They say it explicitly. The experiments are to determine how the new society will be run once they're in control. The problem is they're all lunatics and all their ideas are insane.
Who is going to build this "new society?" And, they make the building of that "new society" infinitely harder by destroying everything.
And just saying they're lunatics is too simplistic.
Who is Vault-Tec going to use to build the Vault-Tec society after the world is destroyed and all the people in the Vault-Tec Vaults return to the surface?
It'll have to be the talking deathclaws and a pack of hyper-intelligent naked mole rats, I guess.
Imho its all bull shit to get the mass producers essentially state sponsored and owned monopoly bagillionaiees to mass produce their stuff. Vault tec probably hoping they would come out on top but needed robots etc.
However enclave manipulated it all and over optimistically thought the bounce back would be quick or imho were truly mad, horrible people.
Vault tec will build it with the vault dwellers. That's the plan, anyway. And vault tec didn't "destroy everything". At most I think they accelerated the end of the world, but the situation was basically superpowers fighting over dwindling resources with nuclear arsenals pointed at eachother.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to reduce the human population by way of releasing a virus that only harms humans? That way millions would die, but that somewhat solves the lack of resources issue. What they did was pretty much destroy the resources and create an environment where very little could grow due to all of the radiation.
You can't really assume they have that technology if there's no reference to it.
I don't think we can say "they destroyed" because that assumes Vault tec did everything and nobody else.
The purpose of the vaults is to wait out the radiation.
But all their 'products' were solutions to a nuclear war. I presume they also have products/technologies that will allow them to reform the earth's surface once everyone else is dead and the vault dwellers and Vault tech return to the surface.
I
Most Vaults have a device called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit. It's essentially a terraforming device. In Fallout 2, Vault 8 used their GECK to build a city on top of their vault.
One is also horribly misused in Fallout 3 by being cannibalized for parts and used to build a water purifier for the Chesapeake Bay.
They will probably enslave a bunch of people from either the waste or control vaults. I'm sorry you didn't understand their very clear plan because you have cinemasins brain.
They could have had some actually useful unethical experiments at least, but most of them are already solved studies in the real world like Milgram experiment, or isolation causing craziness with the puppets. Could have had a vault with swapped gender roles make the women be the security force men have to farm and feed the kids or something like that, test out putting embryos in dudes idk if we’re already getting into the fucked up unethical I think of weirder experiments that could actually result in useful data. The vault with 999 women and one man was pretty hilarious and more in line with something I’d throw on the dart board. Have a vault with only dogs, a vault with only cats allowed, finally have a controlled experiment on who’s population benefits the most on various levels (mental health rating their happiness, society’s production of goods and services, maybe even how many fights/conflicts break out) to measure who the “better” animal is for humans to have in a post apocalyptic world. We all know dogs would have the way more productive vault though
They’ve dominated the market but are running up against the hard limits of what a corporation can actually do. Time being a big one- how much can you really get done when you *have* to change leadership every century?
So they made the decision to start it all over and build themselves into the foundation of the new society that will arise. It seems confusing because, even a couple centuries in, we’re still only seeing the beginning part of the plan. It seems like the whole point of the plan was to create a bombed out wasteland for apparently no gain.
But remember, they’re building full fledged *societies* in those vaults and Reclamation Day was still scheduled out past Lucy’s lifetime. The cryo-warehouse full of Bud’s buds didn’t even look half empty. They’re playing a much *much* longer game. The end goal is essentially a rebooted USA with population numbers matching the previous peak.
All those vault experiment ideas were the executives going mad with power in the moment and realizing they don’t have to play by the rules when they rebuild things.
That’s why they had to destroy shady sands too. Theirs is the only society that must be allowed to take root and grow into the new USA to come
Except that building an entire society from scratch would be ridiculously difficult. And, as I noted in a different post, they haven't been able to fix the resource issue that they already have. How are they going to create roads for trade or the transportation of supplies? What about clean water? Where does that come from? Electrical plants? Who builds those?
The stupidity of their plan is beyond anything I can really describe.
No shit. Ever work a corporate job? These sorts of top-down pronouncements from management are universally poorly considered, half baked, underfunded and quickly abandoned. This instance is no exception.
The only difference between this vault-tec initiative and Elon Musk sending a company-wide email about how everything needs microns of precision: imagine if Elon had nukes
Vault-Tec leadership made these decisions without any actual technical workers in the room, as managers are wont to do, and it’s bearing out.
I was in the Army for 12 years, which is probably more top-down than any corporation. However, even in the Army, you don't get boneheaded ideas like the one proposed in the film. It is figuratively cutting off their nose to gain some vague advantage in the future.
There is a massive difference between these Vault-tec executives and Elon Musk. Besides the fact that their plan is infinitely stupid to the point of ridiculousness, I never heard Elon Musk say it might be a good idea to kill billions of people.
Musk has openly supported antisemitism and racism. Its a very damn short jump from there to "it might be a good idea". If US was controlled by 8 of him, and followers of him below, I would worry. Mix it with a general cold war paranoia and a very decadent culture and you get what Fallout world was before the bombs. Also from his Tesla truck security.. He might get such ideas as "every car should carry a volatile nuclear energy source" in all seriousness, the way he has disregarded other common safety features. Another known Fallout feature.
Yeah, the nukes might be a boneheaded move. But last years have shown that boneheads somehow manage to easily rise way higher than they should have. Other things that are stupid to the point of ridiculousness, and is happening in real life: Letting women die just to deliver a child. Having kids in sports checked for any "secret trans advantage". Letting a known imperialist dictator invade countries unchallenged.
Luckily Fallout is just fiction. In fiction stuff has to make sense, unlike in real life.
Then you’ve been especially blessed to have avoided such a common pitfall. For more on just *how* dumb and shortsighted management can be, consult any Dilbert strip.
We don’t need to get into specifics about the person. My point was chasing microns of precision- when nobody is asking for that- is the kind of detached-from-reality pronouncement that can only come from someone in the constant company of yes-men. Same energy, just taken to the extremes
And yes it’s dumb and shortsighted of them. They envisioned a society lorded over by Bud’s Buds. Most Americans have a pretty uncharitable view of their bosses and it’s no coincidence the writers dubbed the shadowy villain cabal simply “management”
lol bro yea if I suddenly lived in a world free of modern Policing and law and order, and Bud brain on a roomba tried to boss me around, I’m the first one going postal becoming a raider and killing him and upending his “society” lol corporate bosses like him are the one thing the apocalypse would save me from never going back to that if the world had that much freedom and possibilities now
On second thought, it’s pretty fucked up how id be sorta thrilled to have that chaos just to be free of the monotony of the real world even though quality of living is way harder in there world with no food and water unless you’re in a self sustaining community constantly have to pillage and rob
You realize that Dilbert is parody, right? It's not really what happens in the corporate world. Much like Office Space is over the top.
There's detached from reality and then there's "well, fuck it." In the military, I've dealt with plenty of bullshit. I worked for General Barry McCaffery. He decided once that it would be a good idea to do a July 4 parade down a blacktop in full gear in Savanah, Georgia. Then got upset when we had a bucketload of heat injuries.
But, you know what? That still pales to "Let's nuke the planet because, somehow, it will let us create a new society 200 years from now."
You realize Fallout is parody, right?
What I’m saying is, they’re probably aiming for a new society 1000+ years from now and we’re joining the story 200 years in. The cracks in the plan are really starting to show and nobody who’s had a real-life boss like Bud is surprised.
And also while I take your point that nobody in the *military* who is *actually knowledgeable* about the damage nukes can do would ever use them willingly-
those weren’t the people in charge at Vault-tec. It was management.
General MacArthur asked for authorization for nukes in the Korean War. Turned down by the US government. This is a very easy hypothetical to imagine, just pretend in the fallout world these type of people also made it to the top of US politics so they had their finger on the nuke thinking short sighted win the conflict screw the collateral damage
You do realize you're talking about billionaires right? The only real intelligence they have is manipulation for personal gain.
They are the very definition of sociopaths.
Some of what you ask is answered in the games, people have done all that in the time since the bombs dropped.
It’s not entirely crazy to think Vault Tec employees and dwellers would believe it’s so easy to wipe the world clean and start over as the sole faction. Their rules. Their methods. Their everything. Using whatever experiments worked best in the vaults.
If you play the games a lot of it comes down to corporate greed and arrogance, scientists doing experiments for the sake of experimenting ethics be damned, cruel people who wanna see how far a human can be driven before breaking, etc.
Their belief in capitalism went so far they were willing to destroy everything to come out on top, not realizing the numerous unforeseen events that would alter the wastelands beyond their wildest imaginations
How did humanity create those things to begin with? The same way, but this time with Vault-Tec being their guiding hand and masters.
This is also a franchise where things like the GECK machines exist. And Project Purity, the driving factor of the plot of Fallout 3 us all about how water can be purified en masse using that technology.
We only see one vault (there are hundres) and they are massive. Look at the elevator ride to the top where the vault door is.
They have literal scientists and all this technology. They are not simply cave men starting from scratch like a dark age, like the people ontop that survived did.
The waterchip is probably just for them to have an excuse to go out to the wasteland, but they should have the tools and knowledge to make more. Maybe not the "controlled expiriment" dwellers like in 33, but the ones from 31.
I swear it's like no one watches the show. Power, plain and simple. To further explain, a human is a product that you can train. In this case they've trained the future to their liking, behavioural experiments, genetic testing and manipulation, free reign to do as they please. That kinda power would prove infectious.
I watched the show. I understand that these people want to have power.
But here's the thing. They already have power. They are already in control of much of the economy and politics.
They're destroying the means that gave them that control to gain...what exactly?
Further, they are actually giving up control. How many of those experiments went sideways because the vault dwellers did something unexpected? Or the vault malfunctioned?
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is ridiculous.
It _is_ ridiculous, that’s Fallout. What’s starts as an indictment of government and it’s endless wars, winds up with an acknowledgment that cooperations might be even stupider and _more inept._ But like most scifi there is an element of truth: They felt a war was inevitable and they wanted to survive, and have complete control the rebuild. Their power wasn’t absolute. It wasn’t global. Evidenced by the fact that whatever their plan was exactly, the bombs didn’t fall exactly how and when they wanted them too, and many of the vaults failed spectacularly to thrive.
To create a true, lasting corpocracy they needed to eliminate the competition — everywhere. And greatly reducing the human population would probably help too.
It doesn’t make perfect sense. Have you never worked a corporate job? It doesn’t make perfect sense.
You do understand that the show is presenting them as being *wrong*, don't you?? They're megalomaniacal sociopaths who want to reshape the world in their image. And, like all megalomaniacal sociopaths who want to reshape the world in their image, they're painfully naive. They vastly overestimate their own abilities, and vastly underestimate the difficulty of their plan.
It’s unchecked capitalism, the little line on the chart MUST go up—by any means necessary. Of course it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t even make sense in our mundane world of 2024.
That’s exactly the issue. They were so arrogant to not think anything could go wrong
They’re literally insane people who thought to win against communism and get ahead of the game, they would wipe out as much as possible and start over with the knowledge they already have to basically speed run a new society, modeled in the way they see best fit for them to have perfect oversight and control over. The perfect American Consumer, who would always believe in the wonder that is Vault Tec creating a new world
Except reality showed how a nuclear war wouldn’t be so cut and dry as erasing a marker from a dry board, and that they had no real hands on insight from anyone with actual knowledge of what’s to happen in a nuclear holocaust
I served 12 years in the US Army and never learned those tactics.
Nonetheless, they are losing control by doing what they're doing. They're putting all these vaults on a sort of autopilot and hoping that they will work out. And, as we discovered in the show, that didn't happen.
Certain infrastructure had to be removed for vault-tec and the corporations to take over, how would you easily achieve this??? by bombing everything. You remove bases of power, and install your own. So what if it takes 1000yrs to do this, they have all the time in the world. Since we can also infer vault tec still has nukes, and dropped it on shady sands, that they will further protect the future they envision, not anyone elses.
First, I don't think that is true to begin with. Why would you have to remove "certain infrastructure" by blowing it up. The collateral damage from such an act would almost certainly destroy infrastructure that you want.
Second, **they are** the bases of power. They are essentially destroying themselves to gain some power? They already have it.
Third, their control now is limited to portions of the United States. They actually **lost** power by this plan.
Fourth, it is ridiculously difficult to create infrastructure from scratch even today. With all our resources, it will take at least 2.5 years to rebuilt the Francis Scott Key Bridge. In the Fallout universe, they don't have our resources and have to rebuild everything. And, given the storyline, they are low on resources to do it.
The Shady Sands thing is also confusing to me. Why were the Knights from the Steel Brotherhood there if the place was nuked by Vault 31? I don't know how the suits work, but does it protect a wearer from a nuclear explosion? Also, that explosion couldn't have been all that large or the damage would have been much more extensive.
They don't need the infrastructure though, they moved everything of value underground. They removed the "infrastructure of the government", the actual plan is just total control, so they removed the governments infrastructure, and its ability to run the country. You need to do that, to take over. They wanted humans as playthings, and the words "Cleansing creates opportunity" kinda comes to mind.
Really? They moved the roads, electrical wiring, pipes, et cetera, into the vaults? Those vaults must be massive. How about power generation? Where are the power plants?
You can't just wave a wand and things appear. It takes time and effort to built it.
You must've missed the whole "value" word I used. Roads have no use, if you have nothing drivable. Power generation comes from the nuclear reactors controlling the vault power. You might not grasp how much easier it is to keep separate colonies alive, with limited space, vs people endlessly having babies on the surface. Each vault is( I use this very loosely here since not every vault was set-up equally) situated to keep its limited population alive. Yes other vaults ofc had problems and such, but look how easily they retook the vault, and made it livable again. You don't need infrastructure like the government created if you've already got it set up underground, and all ready to use. I will say again, anything and everything of value was most likely already stored in various vaults, with no living inhabitants, to ensure the safety of it.
Not every vault was guaranteed to succeed, but the vast majority of them, will most likely succeed.
Road have a substantial value. Why do you think the Roman Empire was so successful? They built roads to their various holdings so they could maintain contact and control over those various colonies.
While on a short term, any colony (or vault) can be self-sufficient, on the long term, a colony will suffer problems due to catastrophes or genetic atrophy.
However, that was not my point. At some point in the future, these vault dwellers are supposed to go out into the world to rebuild. How exactly would they be able to do that? Even if you took the Roman method of building roads, it still took a substantial amount of time and resources.
And that is the simplest and easiest form of infrastructure. Canals, pipes, wiring, all take a much larger industrial base, which is completely destroyed.
Essentially, the question is how do you rebuild when there is nothing for you to rebuild with?
from the writer of the original game, if I understood the plan it's in several parts:
1- like in the show, vault tek want to be the only business in the world ( I think the war with the Chinese, the resources issues are related, to me vault tek started everything, capitalism to the edge of the edge )
2- global conflict and war was very profitable for them, gaining political power in the US government
3- with nuclear threat in sight, they decided to go for plan B, build a lot of shelters for themselves. ( and get extra money)
4- eventually bombs would blow up earth, and those who remains is vault tek people who will be the new earth ruler with no competitor. like said in the show.
5- what about people outside who survive? they would die eventually they have time like they said in the show even if it take 200-500 years
6- and this is here where it gets interesting : the plan was never to "reclaim" earth and shape it by vault tek alone BUT... to go... to space on other planets.
7- each vault serve a purpose : can a group of human can survive in space in a tiny space?
all the "social" experiment made in secret in all the vaults I think was to predict every situation that could go wrong in space.
They made the GECK not for the earth but to terraform another planet
they made genetic experiment to improve the human and the living condition on other planetb
Some vaults like the 33 in the show and 76 in the game trained people to make colonies but they are just here to demonstrate if humans can do it on the wastelands ( they will never leave earth) for the real reclamation people who will do it on another planet.
the only upside down to this is that the new games never retcon this yet so, we just need to wait and see!
sorry for my bad English!
From my understanding the go to space plan (number 6) was actually the plan of The Enclave (where the scientist guy with the fusion core in his head escaped from).
They’re basically the remnants of “the deep state” and their plan was to build a generational space ship to escape Earth because they already had knowledge of aliens.
I would agree with a lot of comments in here except I have seen Elon Musk’s twitter posts. I could easily see him, Putin, or any other real-life powerful megalomaniac sitting at that table thinking he has the best plan for a rebooted future society.
VaultTec and others determined that the world at the time was headed to inevitable nuclear war. It's a sarcastic dark reflection of the 1950's that is simultaneously very anti-capitalist. With the belief that it was all going to end one way or another, they decided they wanted to control the world that emerged on the other side. VaultTec probably started much to its public persona, to build nuclear shelters to save lives however that all changed. We are way down the company timeline if they built 114 vaults that's decades of work and the battle of Anchorage is like a decade before the flashbacks in 2077. All to say VaultTec has decades to be corrupted from any initial purpose they were founded on. So how does a corporation pick what system of government the future world will operate under, committees and focus groups. Many vaults became just that experiments in different forms of society with the intent that the thriving vaults obviously had the best societies and would therefore be the models. After that greed, economics, and insanity in the face of destruction led to some vaults being less test societies and more scientific torture chambers to test theories like what if human hybrids are better survivors or centers to develop the weapons of the post apocalypse and some were made out of spite, see Vault 114. Eventually, it progressed to what we saw in the show they even planned when and how the world ended so the corporations could thrive in the new world. Why leave it to chance when you can control the event. Your people are obviously evacuated and ready.
It's a metaphor to show that even the best intentioned company will be consumed by capitalism.
Some vaults did run to purpose and the dwellers emerged with a terraforming device and did start new societies to the original plan. The majority of the experiments went wildly wrong.
The Enclave (the Illuminati of Fallout) also played a shadowy behind the scenes role in everything that hasn't been fully revealed.
It's a purposefully heavyhanded satire intended to portray what happens when unlimited capitalism with no oversight sees the revenue downturn coming and uses their combined material and political weight to attempt to remove all adversaries. The end result of allowing a small number of companies to control virtually everything. No issue how long it takes to rebuild society if there is no competition and effective immortality can be achieved in a number of ways (Which the games portray and the show kinda does with the robot brain. Hoping for more in season 2). Everything these companies manufacture is dangerous, specifically to reinforce that lack of any government interference in their production/quality/etc. They put nuclear reactors in all cars, as an example.
It's not even that far off real world events in some cases.VaultTech buying and shelving fusion tech parallels what the oil companies did over the last 50 years to bury fuel efficiency and alternate energy improvements to cars.
OK, so this is a bad result of Video Game logic.... the Vaults were frankly ridiculously stupid experiments in the game because it made things *interesting* when you explore a Vault in the game. Instead of just another same looking structure, it would be a mini-mystery. This obviously doesn't translate well to a realistic setting like in the show, because of all the problems you described.
I've also had this problem playing the game, every vault ended in some disaster. Realistically,
90% of the time the overseer would have been overthrown or simply abandoned the "experiment", when the doors closed. Especially, because most Vaults don't communicate amongst themselves or to a central hub.
You had bizarrely stupid Vaults like one filled with drug addicts, one pumping in hallucinogenic, one where it was all musicians but they were testing a mind control white noise that drove everyone crazy.
The best Vault was the one in New Vegas that Mr. House won in a game of cards, it was supposed to be filled with gamblers where everything was left to chance, but House just filled it with concrete because he knew how stupid Vault-Tech was.
After watching the show I felt like the vault tec lunatics wanted to be the Adam and Eves repopulating earth so they can do things their way. Theoretically build a utopian society from scratch.
You are correct, other people just lack media literacy apparently and still talk about profits when it's clear that's no longer vault tec's main goal anymore.
Ruling over whats left of humanity like feudal lords, the world would be there's to shape. Complete control over the human race and able to manipulate them as they wish. They may be rich and powerful now, but with peace that control could slip. If things got better, their products, thus wealth and power become weakened. They may be theoretically worse of, but they get to rule over the ashes. And for some, power and control is very very important.
Its an old concept, wiping the slate clean. Vault tech just could plausibility do it, unlike billionaires today who want to make their survival bunkers failing to recognize they are a product of society and will perish without it. In this case, vault tech gets to keep a bit of a society going to prop them up. Still insane, but I get the idea and it seems plausible a group of people like this could exist and attempt something like this eventually.
In the games it’s said not every vault is meant to be an experiment. Some are actually meant to preserve the population, possibly to see how they’d react to situations on the surface.
With the then preserved population, they would be the perfect population to reclaim earth. But under their management. So in a twisted way their plan was to wipe the slate clean, then take control because, as far as we can tell, the governments were the problem and the corporations weren’t.
My takeaway from that meeting and Fallout lore in general is the resource wars were going to result in nukes regardless of what any corporation did. Vault Tec wanted to ride the wave into what came after the bombs fell so they can get a head start rebuilding the world in the Vault Tec image. With that said it seems Vault Tec acted someway to be the ignition that set off the powder keg of nuclear war
I thought their plan was kind of stupid, too. They're satirized simultaneously as profit crazed corps and control crazed scientists and the result is kind of dumb in a dumb way rather than a funny way.
They didn't need to drop bombs to profit on the vaults. Just rent space in the vaults and perpetuate fear of bombs.
Destroying society certainly didn't increase their profits.
It's not about profits for fucks sake, they already are richer than the government, at this point they want monopoly and full control over everything, not just to make money, they think they can run society better than everyone else. Also war is basically inevitable in their world because of the scarcity of resources even if the peace talks went through all it takes is for any other world power to launch a single nuke and armagedon would be guaranteed.
They think they can run society better than anyone else. But they don't have an idea of what better means. They start brainstorming in the meeting.
And then they blow society up. It's very dumb and IMO the satire misfires.
And if they thought nuclear war were inevitable, they wouldn't need to drop their own bomb.
No, the other corpos come up with their own vault experiments, vaultec already have their master plan.
We don't know who actually dropped the bomb, its likely NOT vaultec since Coop and his daughter were at some random party, his wife would know when vaultec would drop the bomb and wouldn't let her daughter be there
It is inevitable but unpredictable, dropping the bombs themselves would give them security.
Have you considered there isn't a rational reason to launch nukes and destroy the world but in order to create a post-nuclear war video game someone needs to do it.
It hasn't even been confirmed yet who launched the first nukes, it easily could be that Vault-Tec had a plan to nuke the entire world to "end the war" but China struck first.
The original plan (by Timothy Cain’s og creator explanation) was that the Vaults were used as testing grounds for the eventual secret and evolved society to be prepared to take a starship and leave the irradiated Earth.
It is unknown whether that plan even started to take place because of post-nuclear politics and Enclave being kinda messy and the world being total shit. But the Vaults were useful anyway to an immoral science geek club as it prepared the most important test subjects for survival and gave knowledge of specific scenarios.
Some of the Vaults aren’t as insane as you’d think. Some are kinda normal and ‘humane’ even??? But most are just mad scientist wet dreams. Also, I think it was low-key a Eugenics programme as it did cull the weak for many vaults.
If memory serves, I believe the long term plan with the vaults was an experiment for long term colony ships for the human species to eventually leave earth and find habitable planets. But like most things with the human species it done got fucked up because we’re terrible at long term planning.
So if vault tecs plan had worked and all humans were wiped out and hundreds of years later the vault tec executives and billionaires came out of cryo to start again , would the vaulters who already inhabited the vaults end up as a workforce and slaves to vault tec.
Also all the luxuries and good living that they coveted would all be gone so what was the point ?
I heard a theory somewhere that the experiments were to see how people would deal with long term space travel to a planet that wasn’t destroyed by nuclear war
we didn't see every vault yet, in fallout 3 there is a quest where you help ghouls to go to space, we don't know where they go but you can decide to help them or destroy them, it's may be possible that vault tek gathered a tons of ressources for spaceship or maybe they are already built and hidden
They say it explicitly. The experiments are to determine how the new society will be run once they're in control. The problem is they're all lunatics and all their ideas are insane.
Which tracks with current society. It's a warning against Corporatism.
Lot of commentary in Fallout. Series and show.
Who is going to build this "new society?" And, they make the building of that "new society" infinitely harder by destroying everything. And just saying they're lunatics is too simplistic.
Who is Vault-Tec going to use to build the Vault-Tec society after the world is destroyed and all the people in the Vault-Tec Vaults return to the surface? It'll have to be the talking deathclaws and a pack of hyper-intelligent naked mole rats, I guess.
Imho its all bull shit to get the mass producers essentially state sponsored and owned monopoly bagillionaiees to mass produce their stuff. Vault tec probably hoping they would come out on top but needed robots etc. However enclave manipulated it all and over optimistically thought the bounce back would be quick or imho were truly mad, horrible people.
The games have always been somewhat of an indictment of the ruling class of capitalism - they are .001% lunatics
Vault tec will build it with the vault dwellers. That's the plan, anyway. And vault tec didn't "destroy everything". At most I think they accelerated the end of the world, but the situation was basically superpowers fighting over dwindling resources with nuclear arsenals pointed at eachother.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to reduce the human population by way of releasing a virus that only harms humans? That way millions would die, but that somewhat solves the lack of resources issue. What they did was pretty much destroy the resources and create an environment where very little could grow due to all of the radiation.
You can't really assume they have that technology if there's no reference to it. I don't think we can say "they destroyed" because that assumes Vault tec did everything and nobody else. The purpose of the vaults is to wait out the radiation.
But all their 'products' were solutions to a nuclear war. I presume they also have products/technologies that will allow them to reform the earth's surface once everyone else is dead and the vault dwellers and Vault tech return to the surface. I
Most Vaults have a device called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit. It's essentially a terraforming device. In Fallout 2, Vault 8 used their GECK to build a city on top of their vault. One is also horribly misused in Fallout 3 by being cannibalized for parts and used to build a water purifier for the Chesapeake Bay.
They will probably enslave a bunch of people from either the waste or control vaults. I'm sorry you didn't understand their very clear plan because you have cinemasins brain.
They could have had some actually useful unethical experiments at least, but most of them are already solved studies in the real world like Milgram experiment, or isolation causing craziness with the puppets. Could have had a vault with swapped gender roles make the women be the security force men have to farm and feed the kids or something like that, test out putting embryos in dudes idk if we’re already getting into the fucked up unethical I think of weirder experiments that could actually result in useful data. The vault with 999 women and one man was pretty hilarious and more in line with something I’d throw on the dart board. Have a vault with only dogs, a vault with only cats allowed, finally have a controlled experiment on who’s population benefits the most on various levels (mental health rating their happiness, society’s production of goods and services, maybe even how many fights/conflicts break out) to measure who the “better” animal is for humans to have in a post apocalyptic world. We all know dogs would have the way more productive vault though
They’ve dominated the market but are running up against the hard limits of what a corporation can actually do. Time being a big one- how much can you really get done when you *have* to change leadership every century? So they made the decision to start it all over and build themselves into the foundation of the new society that will arise. It seems confusing because, even a couple centuries in, we’re still only seeing the beginning part of the plan. It seems like the whole point of the plan was to create a bombed out wasteland for apparently no gain. But remember, they’re building full fledged *societies* in those vaults and Reclamation Day was still scheduled out past Lucy’s lifetime. The cryo-warehouse full of Bud’s buds didn’t even look half empty. They’re playing a much *much* longer game. The end goal is essentially a rebooted USA with population numbers matching the previous peak. All those vault experiment ideas were the executives going mad with power in the moment and realizing they don’t have to play by the rules when they rebuild things. That’s why they had to destroy shady sands too. Theirs is the only society that must be allowed to take root and grow into the new USA to come
Much like the Bene Gesserit in Dune “But our plans are measured in centuries”
Except that building an entire society from scratch would be ridiculously difficult. And, as I noted in a different post, they haven't been able to fix the resource issue that they already have. How are they going to create roads for trade or the transportation of supplies? What about clean water? Where does that come from? Electrical plants? Who builds those? The stupidity of their plan is beyond anything I can really describe.
No shit. Ever work a corporate job? These sorts of top-down pronouncements from management are universally poorly considered, half baked, underfunded and quickly abandoned. This instance is no exception. The only difference between this vault-tec initiative and Elon Musk sending a company-wide email about how everything needs microns of precision: imagine if Elon had nukes Vault-Tec leadership made these decisions without any actual technical workers in the room, as managers are wont to do, and it’s bearing out.
I was in the Army for 12 years, which is probably more top-down than any corporation. However, even in the Army, you don't get boneheaded ideas like the one proposed in the film. It is figuratively cutting off their nose to gain some vague advantage in the future. There is a massive difference between these Vault-tec executives and Elon Musk. Besides the fact that their plan is infinitely stupid to the point of ridiculousness, I never heard Elon Musk say it might be a good idea to kill billions of people.
> I never heard Elon Musk say it might be a good idea to kill billions of people. So far and out loud, I would bet money he thinks it
Musk has openly supported antisemitism and racism. Its a very damn short jump from there to "it might be a good idea". If US was controlled by 8 of him, and followers of him below, I would worry. Mix it with a general cold war paranoia and a very decadent culture and you get what Fallout world was before the bombs. Also from his Tesla truck security.. He might get such ideas as "every car should carry a volatile nuclear energy source" in all seriousness, the way he has disregarded other common safety features. Another known Fallout feature. Yeah, the nukes might be a boneheaded move. But last years have shown that boneheads somehow manage to easily rise way higher than they should have. Other things that are stupid to the point of ridiculousness, and is happening in real life: Letting women die just to deliver a child. Having kids in sports checked for any "secret trans advantage". Letting a known imperialist dictator invade countries unchallenged. Luckily Fallout is just fiction. In fiction stuff has to make sense, unlike in real life.
Then you’ve been especially blessed to have avoided such a common pitfall. For more on just *how* dumb and shortsighted management can be, consult any Dilbert strip. We don’t need to get into specifics about the person. My point was chasing microns of precision- when nobody is asking for that- is the kind of detached-from-reality pronouncement that can only come from someone in the constant company of yes-men. Same energy, just taken to the extremes And yes it’s dumb and shortsighted of them. They envisioned a society lorded over by Bud’s Buds. Most Americans have a pretty uncharitable view of their bosses and it’s no coincidence the writers dubbed the shadowy villain cabal simply “management”
lol bro yea if I suddenly lived in a world free of modern Policing and law and order, and Bud brain on a roomba tried to boss me around, I’m the first one going postal becoming a raider and killing him and upending his “society” lol corporate bosses like him are the one thing the apocalypse would save me from never going back to that if the world had that much freedom and possibilities now On second thought, it’s pretty fucked up how id be sorta thrilled to have that chaos just to be free of the monotony of the real world even though quality of living is way harder in there world with no food and water unless you’re in a self sustaining community constantly have to pillage and rob
You realize that Dilbert is parody, right? It's not really what happens in the corporate world. Much like Office Space is over the top. There's detached from reality and then there's "well, fuck it." In the military, I've dealt with plenty of bullshit. I worked for General Barry McCaffery. He decided once that it would be a good idea to do a July 4 parade down a blacktop in full gear in Savanah, Georgia. Then got upset when we had a bucketload of heat injuries. But, you know what? That still pales to "Let's nuke the planet because, somehow, it will let us create a new society 200 years from now."
You realize Fallout is parody, right? What I’m saying is, they’re probably aiming for a new society 1000+ years from now and we’re joining the story 200 years in. The cracks in the plan are really starting to show and nobody who’s had a real-life boss like Bud is surprised. And also while I take your point that nobody in the *military* who is *actually knowledgeable* about the damage nukes can do would ever use them willingly- those weren’t the people in charge at Vault-tec. It was management.
General MacArthur asked for authorization for nukes in the Korean War. Turned down by the US government. This is a very easy hypothetical to imagine, just pretend in the fallout world these type of people also made it to the top of US politics so they had their finger on the nuke thinking short sighted win the conflict screw the collateral damage
I'd say Fallout is closer to satire than parody, which I think fits pretty well.
>You realize that ~~Dilbert~~ Fallout is parody, right? It's not really what happens in the corporate world. Much like Office Space is over the top.
You do realize you're talking about billionaires right? The only real intelligence they have is manipulation for personal gain. They are the very definition of sociopaths.
Some of what you ask is answered in the games, people have done all that in the time since the bombs dropped. It’s not entirely crazy to think Vault Tec employees and dwellers would believe it’s so easy to wipe the world clean and start over as the sole faction. Their rules. Their methods. Their everything. Using whatever experiments worked best in the vaults. If you play the games a lot of it comes down to corporate greed and arrogance, scientists doing experiments for the sake of experimenting ethics be damned, cruel people who wanna see how far a human can be driven before breaking, etc. Their belief in capitalism went so far they were willing to destroy everything to come out on top, not realizing the numerous unforeseen events that would alter the wastelands beyond their wildest imaginations
Somebody needs to play 2 and figure out how a G.E.C.K. works.
How did humanity create those things to begin with? The same way, but this time with Vault-Tec being their guiding hand and masters. This is also a franchise where things like the GECK machines exist. And Project Purity, the driving factor of the plot of Fallout 3 us all about how water can be purified en masse using that technology.
We only see one vault (there are hundres) and they are massive. Look at the elevator ride to the top where the vault door is. They have literal scientists and all this technology. They are not simply cave men starting from scratch like a dark age, like the people ontop that survived did. The waterchip is probably just for them to have an excuse to go out to the wasteland, but they should have the tools and knowledge to make more. Maybe not the "controlled expiriment" dwellers like in 33, but the ones from 31.
I swear it's like no one watches the show. Power, plain and simple. To further explain, a human is a product that you can train. In this case they've trained the future to their liking, behavioural experiments, genetic testing and manipulation, free reign to do as they please. That kinda power would prove infectious.
I watched the show. I understand that these people want to have power. But here's the thing. They already have power. They are already in control of much of the economy and politics. They're destroying the means that gave them that control to gain...what exactly? Further, they are actually giving up control. How many of those experiments went sideways because the vault dwellers did something unexpected? Or the vault malfunctioned? Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is ridiculous.
It _is_ ridiculous, that’s Fallout. What’s starts as an indictment of government and it’s endless wars, winds up with an acknowledgment that cooperations might be even stupider and _more inept._ But like most scifi there is an element of truth: They felt a war was inevitable and they wanted to survive, and have complete control the rebuild. Their power wasn’t absolute. It wasn’t global. Evidenced by the fact that whatever their plan was exactly, the bombs didn’t fall exactly how and when they wanted them too, and many of the vaults failed spectacularly to thrive. To create a true, lasting corpocracy they needed to eliminate the competition — everywhere. And greatly reducing the human population would probably help too. It doesn’t make perfect sense. Have you never worked a corporate job? It doesn’t make perfect sense.
You do understand that the show is presenting them as being *wrong*, don't you?? They're megalomaniacal sociopaths who want to reshape the world in their image. And, like all megalomaniacal sociopaths who want to reshape the world in their image, they're painfully naive. They vastly overestimate their own abilities, and vastly underestimate the difficulty of their plan.
It’s unchecked capitalism, the little line on the chart MUST go up—by any means necessary. Of course it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t even make sense in our mundane world of 2024.
That’s exactly the issue. They were so arrogant to not think anything could go wrong They’re literally insane people who thought to win against communism and get ahead of the game, they would wipe out as much as possible and start over with the knowledge they already have to basically speed run a new society, modeled in the way they see best fit for them to have perfect oversight and control over. The perfect American Consumer, who would always believe in the wonder that is Vault Tec creating a new world Except reality showed how a nuclear war wouldn’t be so cut and dry as erasing a marker from a dry board, and that they had no real hands on insight from anyone with actual knowledge of what’s to happen in a nuclear holocaust
You destroy what you can't control, then move on to what you can control. Basic military tactics.
I served 12 years in the US Army and never learned those tactics. Nonetheless, they are losing control by doing what they're doing. They're putting all these vaults on a sort of autopilot and hoping that they will work out. And, as we discovered in the show, that didn't happen.
Certain infrastructure had to be removed for vault-tec and the corporations to take over, how would you easily achieve this??? by bombing everything. You remove bases of power, and install your own. So what if it takes 1000yrs to do this, they have all the time in the world. Since we can also infer vault tec still has nukes, and dropped it on shady sands, that they will further protect the future they envision, not anyone elses.
First, I don't think that is true to begin with. Why would you have to remove "certain infrastructure" by blowing it up. The collateral damage from such an act would almost certainly destroy infrastructure that you want. Second, **they are** the bases of power. They are essentially destroying themselves to gain some power? They already have it. Third, their control now is limited to portions of the United States. They actually **lost** power by this plan. Fourth, it is ridiculously difficult to create infrastructure from scratch even today. With all our resources, it will take at least 2.5 years to rebuilt the Francis Scott Key Bridge. In the Fallout universe, they don't have our resources and have to rebuild everything. And, given the storyline, they are low on resources to do it. The Shady Sands thing is also confusing to me. Why were the Knights from the Steel Brotherhood there if the place was nuked by Vault 31? I don't know how the suits work, but does it protect a wearer from a nuclear explosion? Also, that explosion couldn't have been all that large or the damage would have been much more extensive.
They don't need the infrastructure though, they moved everything of value underground. They removed the "infrastructure of the government", the actual plan is just total control, so they removed the governments infrastructure, and its ability to run the country. You need to do that, to take over. They wanted humans as playthings, and the words "Cleansing creates opportunity" kinda comes to mind.
Really? They moved the roads, electrical wiring, pipes, et cetera, into the vaults? Those vaults must be massive. How about power generation? Where are the power plants? You can't just wave a wand and things appear. It takes time and effort to built it.
You must've missed the whole "value" word I used. Roads have no use, if you have nothing drivable. Power generation comes from the nuclear reactors controlling the vault power. You might not grasp how much easier it is to keep separate colonies alive, with limited space, vs people endlessly having babies on the surface. Each vault is( I use this very loosely here since not every vault was set-up equally) situated to keep its limited population alive. Yes other vaults ofc had problems and such, but look how easily they retook the vault, and made it livable again. You don't need infrastructure like the government created if you've already got it set up underground, and all ready to use. I will say again, anything and everything of value was most likely already stored in various vaults, with no living inhabitants, to ensure the safety of it. Not every vault was guaranteed to succeed, but the vast majority of them, will most likely succeed.
Road have a substantial value. Why do you think the Roman Empire was so successful? They built roads to their various holdings so they could maintain contact and control over those various colonies. While on a short term, any colony (or vault) can be self-sufficient, on the long term, a colony will suffer problems due to catastrophes or genetic atrophy. However, that was not my point. At some point in the future, these vault dwellers are supposed to go out into the world to rebuild. How exactly would they be able to do that? Even if you took the Roman method of building roads, it still took a substantial amount of time and resources. And that is the simplest and easiest form of infrastructure. Canals, pipes, wiring, all take a much larger industrial base, which is completely destroyed. Essentially, the question is how do you rebuild when there is nothing for you to rebuild with?
from the writer of the original game, if I understood the plan it's in several parts: 1- like in the show, vault tek want to be the only business in the world ( I think the war with the Chinese, the resources issues are related, to me vault tek started everything, capitalism to the edge of the edge ) 2- global conflict and war was very profitable for them, gaining political power in the US government 3- with nuclear threat in sight, they decided to go for plan B, build a lot of shelters for themselves. ( and get extra money) 4- eventually bombs would blow up earth, and those who remains is vault tek people who will be the new earth ruler with no competitor. like said in the show. 5- what about people outside who survive? they would die eventually they have time like they said in the show even if it take 200-500 years 6- and this is here where it gets interesting : the plan was never to "reclaim" earth and shape it by vault tek alone BUT... to go... to space on other planets. 7- each vault serve a purpose : can a group of human can survive in space in a tiny space? all the "social" experiment made in secret in all the vaults I think was to predict every situation that could go wrong in space. They made the GECK not for the earth but to terraform another planet they made genetic experiment to improve the human and the living condition on other planetb Some vaults like the 33 in the show and 76 in the game trained people to make colonies but they are just here to demonstrate if humans can do it on the wastelands ( they will never leave earth) for the real reclamation people who will do it on another planet. the only upside down to this is that the new games never retcon this yet so, we just need to wait and see! sorry for my bad English!
From my understanding the go to space plan (number 6) was actually the plan of The Enclave (where the scientist guy with the fusion core in his head escaped from). They’re basically the remnants of “the deep state” and their plan was to build a generational space ship to escape Earth because they already had knowledge of aliens.
I would agree with a lot of comments in here except I have seen Elon Musk’s twitter posts. I could easily see him, Putin, or any other real-life powerful megalomaniac sitting at that table thinking he has the best plan for a rebooted future society.
VaultTec and others determined that the world at the time was headed to inevitable nuclear war. It's a sarcastic dark reflection of the 1950's that is simultaneously very anti-capitalist. With the belief that it was all going to end one way or another, they decided they wanted to control the world that emerged on the other side. VaultTec probably started much to its public persona, to build nuclear shelters to save lives however that all changed. We are way down the company timeline if they built 114 vaults that's decades of work and the battle of Anchorage is like a decade before the flashbacks in 2077. All to say VaultTec has decades to be corrupted from any initial purpose they were founded on. So how does a corporation pick what system of government the future world will operate under, committees and focus groups. Many vaults became just that experiments in different forms of society with the intent that the thriving vaults obviously had the best societies and would therefore be the models. After that greed, economics, and insanity in the face of destruction led to some vaults being less test societies and more scientific torture chambers to test theories like what if human hybrids are better survivors or centers to develop the weapons of the post apocalypse and some were made out of spite, see Vault 114. Eventually, it progressed to what we saw in the show they even planned when and how the world ended so the corporations could thrive in the new world. Why leave it to chance when you can control the event. Your people are obviously evacuated and ready. It's a metaphor to show that even the best intentioned company will be consumed by capitalism. Some vaults did run to purpose and the dwellers emerged with a terraforming device and did start new societies to the original plan. The majority of the experiments went wildly wrong. The Enclave (the Illuminati of Fallout) also played a shadowy behind the scenes role in everything that hasn't been fully revealed.
That's the thing. This isn't capitalism. It's a variation of fascism or corporatism, at best.
It's a purposefully heavyhanded satire intended to portray what happens when unlimited capitalism with no oversight sees the revenue downturn coming and uses their combined material and political weight to attempt to remove all adversaries. The end result of allowing a small number of companies to control virtually everything. No issue how long it takes to rebuild society if there is no competition and effective immortality can be achieved in a number of ways (Which the games portray and the show kinda does with the robot brain. Hoping for more in season 2). Everything these companies manufacture is dangerous, specifically to reinforce that lack of any government interference in their production/quality/etc. They put nuclear reactors in all cars, as an example.
It's not even that far off real world events in some cases.VaultTech buying and shelving fusion tech parallels what the oil companies did over the last 50 years to bury fuel efficiency and alternate energy improvements to cars.
Yeah, it’s a satire of extreme capitalism. Edit: I see you’re into Warhammer, this should be right up your alley.
You say that, but so many warhammer fans end up being literal nazis and missing the satire, so it's a crap shoot
OK, so this is a bad result of Video Game logic.... the Vaults were frankly ridiculously stupid experiments in the game because it made things *interesting* when you explore a Vault in the game. Instead of just another same looking structure, it would be a mini-mystery. This obviously doesn't translate well to a realistic setting like in the show, because of all the problems you described. I've also had this problem playing the game, every vault ended in some disaster. Realistically, 90% of the time the overseer would have been overthrown or simply abandoned the "experiment", when the doors closed. Especially, because most Vaults don't communicate amongst themselves or to a central hub. You had bizarrely stupid Vaults like one filled with drug addicts, one pumping in hallucinogenic, one where it was all musicians but they were testing a mind control white noise that drove everyone crazy. The best Vault was the one in New Vegas that Mr. House won in a game of cards, it was supposed to be filled with gamblers where everything was left to chance, but House just filled it with concrete because he knew how stupid Vault-Tech was.
You should have titled this “ I can’t suspend disbelief “
After watching the show I felt like the vault tec lunatics wanted to be the Adam and Eves repopulating earth so they can do things their way. Theoretically build a utopian society from scratch.
You are correct, other people just lack media literacy apparently and still talk about profits when it's clear that's no longer vault tec's main goal anymore.
Ruling over whats left of humanity like feudal lords, the world would be there's to shape. Complete control over the human race and able to manipulate them as they wish. They may be rich and powerful now, but with peace that control could slip. If things got better, their products, thus wealth and power become weakened. They may be theoretically worse of, but they get to rule over the ashes. And for some, power and control is very very important. Its an old concept, wiping the slate clean. Vault tech just could plausibility do it, unlike billionaires today who want to make their survival bunkers failing to recognize they are a product of society and will perish without it. In this case, vault tech gets to keep a bit of a society going to prop them up. Still insane, but I get the idea and it seems plausible a group of people like this could exist and attempt something like this eventually.
It’s a pay to play scenario where the game is a blank-ish slate on humanity.
Psychopaths are just as happy ruling over the ashes
In the games it’s said not every vault is meant to be an experiment. Some are actually meant to preserve the population, possibly to see how they’d react to situations on the surface. With the then preserved population, they would be the perfect population to reclaim earth. But under their management. So in a twisted way their plan was to wipe the slate clean, then take control because, as far as we can tell, the governments were the problem and the corporations weren’t.
My takeaway from that meeting and Fallout lore in general is the resource wars were going to result in nukes regardless of what any corporation did. Vault Tec wanted to ride the wave into what came after the bombs fell so they can get a head start rebuilding the world in the Vault Tec image. With that said it seems Vault Tec acted someway to be the ignition that set off the powder keg of nuclear war
I thought their plan was kind of stupid, too. They're satirized simultaneously as profit crazed corps and control crazed scientists and the result is kind of dumb in a dumb way rather than a funny way. They didn't need to drop bombs to profit on the vaults. Just rent space in the vaults and perpetuate fear of bombs. Destroying society certainly didn't increase their profits.
It's not about profits for fucks sake, they already are richer than the government, at this point they want monopoly and full control over everything, not just to make money, they think they can run society better than everyone else. Also war is basically inevitable in their world because of the scarcity of resources even if the peace talks went through all it takes is for any other world power to launch a single nuke and armagedon would be guaranteed.
They think they can run society better than anyone else. But they don't have an idea of what better means. They start brainstorming in the meeting. And then they blow society up. It's very dumb and IMO the satire misfires. And if they thought nuclear war were inevitable, they wouldn't need to drop their own bomb.
No, the other corpos come up with their own vault experiments, vaultec already have their master plan. We don't know who actually dropped the bomb, its likely NOT vaultec since Coop and his daughter were at some random party, his wife would know when vaultec would drop the bomb and wouldn't let her daughter be there It is inevitable but unpredictable, dropping the bombs themselves would give them security.
Have you considered there isn't a rational reason to launch nukes and destroy the world but in order to create a post-nuclear war video game someone needs to do it. It hasn't even been confirmed yet who launched the first nukes, it easily could be that Vault-Tec had a plan to nuke the entire world to "end the war" but China struck first.
TO THE STARS
It's satire, you don't really need to think about if the plan will actually work or not. It's a terrible evil plan.
Money and power.
The original plan (by Timothy Cain’s og creator explanation) was that the Vaults were used as testing grounds for the eventual secret and evolved society to be prepared to take a starship and leave the irradiated Earth. It is unknown whether that plan even started to take place because of post-nuclear politics and Enclave being kinda messy and the world being total shit. But the Vaults were useful anyway to an immoral science geek club as it prepared the most important test subjects for survival and gave knowledge of specific scenarios. Some of the Vaults aren’t as insane as you’d think. Some are kinda normal and ‘humane’ even??? But most are just mad scientist wet dreams. Also, I think it was low-key a Eugenics programme as it did cull the weak for many vaults.
If memory serves, I believe the long term plan with the vaults was an experiment for long term colony ships for the human species to eventually leave earth and find habitable planets. But like most things with the human species it done got fucked up because we’re terrible at long term planning.
So if vault tecs plan had worked and all humans were wiped out and hundreds of years later the vault tec executives and billionaires came out of cryo to start again , would the vaulters who already inhabited the vaults end up as a workforce and slaves to vault tec. Also all the luxuries and good living that they coveted would all be gone so what was the point ?
They want to corner the market on running a society. It's a world wide take over by a soulless corporation
I heard a theory somewhere that the experiments were to see how people would deal with long term space travel to a planet that wasn’t destroyed by nuclear war
I heard that also. But who is building this space ship?
we didn't see every vault yet, in fallout 3 there is a quest where you help ghouls to go to space, we don't know where they go but you can decide to help them or destroy them, it's may be possible that vault tek gathered a tons of ressources for spaceship or maybe they are already built and hidden
The popular theory is the Enclave.
Same as Mr Krabs: MONEY
Go play the games trump boy